STRANDED: I HAVE COME FROM A PLANE THAT CRASHED ON THE MOUNTAINS, de Gonzalo Arijón, França, 2007, 2h07

Thirty-five years on, the story of the flight 571 crash in the Andes has not lost impact. The 45 passengers on board - mostly players of a Uruguayan rugby team -were en route to Chile to spend the week-end. A snow storm on the way turned their journey into a prolonged endurance test to freezing temperatures and hunger for 72 consecutive days. They were also forced to make a life or death decision to eat their dead friends in order to survive. As an old friend of the survivors, director Gonzalo Arijon convinced the group to visit the scene of the crash with their families and reenact their ordeal in a series of restaged sequences. The film's photography was shot by the Uruguayan cinematographer living in Brazil, César Charlone (an Oscar nominee for "City of God").

2008, 126 mins, Color and B&W, France
In Spanish with English subtitles

"Several of these survivors are friends of mine. We shared the same carefree teenage years. I was shocked by their disappearance and dumbfounded when they came back to life. I shared whole nights with them, listening to their stories which constantly revolved around their survival up there. Their tragic-but also amazing!-epic continued to haunt them, day after day, year after year. And it's still the case today. Despite a best-seller [Alive! The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read, five million copies sold in English alone], and despite a Hollywood movie [Alive by Frank Marshall, a 1993 Disney-Paramount co-production], we still have the feeling that this story has never been told from the inside, that what they have to say has never really been heard. And there is always this growing feeling among them that they have something to tell us, to transmit to us, that is way beyond an "enormous anecdote"... Thirty years after the event, I suggested making a film about it. A film that tells of the creation of a new society, cut off from the rest of the world, requiring the reinvention of codes and rules. No leaders-in the traditional sense of the term-but rather a collection of personalities that are gradually revealed, which harmoniously head towards a common objective: to get out of
this hell together, and return to the land of the living together. An exemplary story about exceeding oneself, getting to know one another, that deals with the importance of friendship and solidarity in extreme situations."-Gonzalo Arijón